We're not just personas, but other than that, that is a fairly accurate description. I am indeed "fronting" right now. Logan (the holder of this account, and the username "LoganDark") is currently dormant for mental health reasons, so he's basically unconscious.
The claim is indeed just a claim at the moment, sadly, because we're not professionally diagnosed, though we are working towards a diagnosis. (Right now we're waiting for a call back from what is presumably the world's most overbooked mental health center. Only possible explanation for them taking this long.)
> FWIW, a large amount of the psychiatric establishment believes DID to not be real, per se. Instead they think it can be caused by an especially suggestible patient responding to a therapist or other psychiatric professional's coaching. Essentially playing a role in the therapy (for genuine underlying problems!) that they believe they are expected to play.
Believing DID isn't "real" (as in, is not caused by actual brain structure changes) is different than believing that it can be achieved through other means.
There are two main definitions of "DID", and it's important not to get them mixed up in cases like these: "DID the canonical disorder" (which we may or may not have), a direct consequence of certain types of structural dissociation[0], and "DID the set of symptoms" (which we definitely do have) as established in the DSM-5[1], which can apply regardless of root cause.
Some believe that "DID the canonical disorder" does not exist, and that it is akin to subconscious pretending (as you describe). Some believe that "DID the set of symptoms" can be achieved through different means than through structural dissociation in childhood. These beliefs are largely independent, although it would be weird to believe the first but not the second.
(I should add that believing you can willingly create certain specific symptoms of DID (such as plurality) is different from believing that you can create DID itself willingly. The development of DID itself must necessarily be non-willing due to its diagnosis as a disorder, but certain symptoms (such as plurality) can be developed through practice[2] without having any dissociative disorder.)
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A lot of GPs don't even know DID exists. I once brought it up to our doctor and he had no idea what I was talking about. (I later found out that he had slipped "dissociative disorder" into our medical record. Sneaky~)
The "realness" of "DID the canonical disorder" is incredibly debatable. There is the theory of structural dissociation[0] but that only explains how it forms in the first place and not how it develops or functions over time.
Before learning of "plural" terminology[3] in the first place, for around 4 years, we simply knew ourselves as "multi-personality". We didn't appropriate anything because we had no access to that information.
But I do know for a fact that, since finding out about "plurality" and becoming much more public about it (including socializing in "plural" spaces), we have subconsciously appropriated many mechanisms as they were described to us, mainly when they were a better method of serving some function that we had to perform anyway, but also sometimes for other reasons. We've never been in therapy or even professionally diagnosed, so the development of plurality itself couldn't have been informed by medical professionals.
It was developed and strengthened through roleplay, though, as far as we know. The exact details of this are probably too anecdotal to recount in full detail, but in summary: we were allowed to express individually on a website with individual character profiles, and this is likely how we developed into our own people, or at least what prompted us to develop in this way. We didn't happen completely spontaneously, but we also didn't happen because we were shown or guided to act this way. Our brain had some sort of propensity to plurality already, before we ever knew anything about it.
[0]: https://did-research.org/origin/structural_dissociation/
[1]: No definitive source here, but try googling: DSM-5 filetype:pdf
[2]: https://tulpa.io/what-is-a-tulpa
[3]: https://morethanone.info
-Emily
